Survivor, Hollywood-Style

The 25-year-old blond Australian also just snagged the lead in the Red Dawn remake for United Artists and is currently filming Joss Whedon’s horror flick Cabin In the Woods for that studio. He got his acting chops playing “Kim Hyde” on 171 episodes of Home and Away, the successful Oz TV series where Heath Ledger started.

The way Hemsworth got the part of Thor is one of those great Hollywood stories that happens only once in a blue moon. William Ward at ROAR management had found Hemsworth during one of the manager’s many scouting trips to Australia. Ward brought him to Los Angeles and put him out there to casting directors and production executives.

Hemsworth read for the part of Thor but wasn’t given a test. Instead, his younger brother Liam (who’s also a ROAR client) tested for the role of Thor, but Marvel’s Feige passed. After a conversation with Ward (“You’ve got to reconsider Chris, he’s your guy”), Feige decided to let Hemsworth read again. And once Marvel put him on tape, it was, “Oh, my god.” Branagh came to town last week, saw the test and made the final casting decision today.

Brother Liam, who’s only been in Los Angeles for four weeks and doesn’t even have an agent yet, just got cast as the male lead in the Disney film Last Song opposite Miley Cyrus. Both brothers live in William Ward’s guesthouse. Unreal!

I’d heard Marvel wanted to finalize casting Thor this month because of the pic’s release date of May 20, 2011. So on May 18, the studio cast Loki, the nemesis to Thor. He’s Tom Hiddleston, another unknown to American audiences but an award-winning British actor and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) graduate. He played Winston Churchill’s son in HBO’s The Gathering Storm, but, more to the point, note that Hiddleston starred in Ivanov opposite Sir Kenneth on the London stage and also starred with him in the BBC miniseries Wallander, now on PBS. In 2008, Hiddleston won the Laurence Olivier Stage Award.